Anthony Hargrove remains in football exile years after Bountygate scandal

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Anthony Hargrove remains in football exile years after Bountygate scandal

this is a discussion within the Saints Community Forum; He was was only nine when Anthony Hargrove first considered that things might not go his way in life. This was in 1993, many years before he would become, in order, a pro football player, a drunk, a drug addict, ...

Anthony Hargrove remains in football exile years after Bountygate scandal

He was was only nine when Anthony Hargrove first considered that things might not go his way in life. This was in 1993, many years before he would become, in order, a pro football player, a drunk, a drug addict, a washout, a janitor, a reclamation project, a Super Bowl winner and, notoriously, a man the NFL accused of scheming to intentionally injure opponents for money. It was report-card day at Parliament Place Elementary, in North Babylon, Long Island. Months earlier, as Anthony’s mother lay sick in a hospital bed, he had presented her with mediocre grades: a B in one course, a D in another, nothing but C’s in between. Rosa Lee, who by then had been indisposed for a year and a half with what was believed to be asthma, proposed to Anthony, “If you get straight A’s, I’m coming home.”

Home was a misnomer, though. Anthony lost contact with his father shortly after his mom became sick; he and his brother Terrence, and sister, Tiffany, had grown up mostly homeless or in shelters. The only home they knew was a foster-care facility on Long Island. Still, Anthony applied himself to his schoolwork, staying late after school with a tutor until, finally, a new report card arrived. His grades were nearly all A’s.

From the school bus that day, Anthony dashed down the street with news of his improvement. Life, he believed, would soon return to normal. This was Jan. 26, 1993—Hargrove remembers because it was on that day that he learned his mother had died from complications of what would later be revealed to him to be AIDS.

“I sat in a tree, and I cried and cried,” Hargrove remembers of losing the woman whose name is tattooed across his right biceps. “I was yelling at God, screaming, ‘How could you do this to me? Now it’s me against the world.’ ”

***

Now, at 31, Hargrove lives in Port Charlotte, Fla., near the town of Deep Creek where he was shipped off to live with an aunt and uncle following his mother’s death. But to find him near the end of last year you had to drive 90 minutes southwest of Nashville, toward the heart of Tennessee. Hargrove was spending the holidays among the rolling hills above the Duck River, at the rural home of his agent, whose family has become a primary source of comfort as Hargrove’s own family has slowly been taken from him. There, in a darkened living room, was a man in football exile.

Pretty decent article on Hargrove and what he is doing after football.